ROSE FOLLY

Sometimes you see another person’s garden and think, ‘Oh my word, I think I’ll rip all my stuff out and create something like this …well try to anyway.’ This is how I feel about Helen Chadwick’s garden, just up the road from me. It is a little piece of heaven called;

If folly means madness, then Helen is rose mad in the most wonderful way. She bought her Blackheath cottage ten years ago. It was then a rental property, with no garden whatsoever. And now? well just look at this. The rose is a fragrant, salmon pink climber called Ali Baba.

What an entrance!

There are not just roses here of course. All the old-fashioned cottage garden plants have a place; clematis, iris, foxgloves etc.

Iris

If this rose isn’t called Raspberries and Cream it should be.

The back yard is just as delightful. Helen was busy dead-heading when I arrived to take these photos; it encourages more blooms and maintains a state of perfection I never manage to achieve. And unlike my poor specimens, there was not a sign of the dreaded blackspot.

Rose perfection.

I thought the tree on the left of the photo below was a jacaranda, which would have been a bit outside its climate range here in the Blue Mountains. But no, it’s the giant leafed paulownia. Not one of Helen’s favourites, but I forgot to ask why.

Thanks for sharing your garden with me Helen. It gives me so much pleasure whenever I walk to the village.

I should add that the garden is adorned with a gorgeous, pale grey and white long haired cat. However, both he and his mistress are rather camera shy.